BREAKING NEWS: The StealthGenie Site Is Offline

It should be added that for the time being, StealthGenie have gone offline. If you’re one of the purchasers of this software, and are unable to contact StealthGenie support, or couldn’t get a StealthGenie refund, then we recommend that you head over to the FlexiSPY Trade In Program, where they will take StealthGenie off your hands.

In this article we take a look at how FlexiSPY and StealthGenie both spy on Viber IM messages.

StealthGenie claims to capture Viber chat logs, call records (Viber calls) and the contact recipient names and numbers. We found it did capture these items, however any other important media (pictures, location, audio messages, stickers etc.) were either not captured at all, or only a blank entry appeared in that part of the logs.

To see the full meaning of an IM conversation you really need to capture more than just the text part of the conversation. StealthGenie captured 3 of 11 types of Viber’s rich content, plus the contact phone number but this is available elsewhere and is not part of the actual conversation. FlexiSPY accurately captured 9 of the 11 media types commonly shared through Viber, providing a much broader meaning of the actual conversation.

stealthgenie screenshot

The communication StealthGenie does capture is displayed in basic spreadsheet form with sequential rows and columns, while FlexiSPY’s layout has each contact on alternating sides for easy readability. Aside from Viber, StealthGenie also claims to capture Facebook, iMessage, Skype, GTalk, BBM, Blackberry PIN and WhatsApp. StealthGenie’s inability to capture rich content extended to all of the other IM services we tested. We look at each of these in other articles from this series.

Is Rich Media Really So Important?

Sharing various media has become an important part of how most people chat, and all popular IM apps now support it. If a picture is sent by a contact and your target user replies “I would love to have that,” then without seeing the picture you can’t know if your target is referring to a great looking apple crumble, or something far more sensual and cheeky like… an Italian cream cheese cake, with muscles. If they say “Meet me here” and send location data, or send an audio recording that says “I love you,” you’ll miss this entirely if location and audio messages aren’t being captured.

Popular IMs like Viber offer users a variety of rich content for more adventurous communications, including stickers, emoticons, audio, pictures, video clips and location data. It’s important that a cell phone monitoring app like FlexiSPY captures much more data than text alone, which you’ll need if you want to understand what is really being said in those chats.

stealthgenie screenshot

These are the 11 Viber rich content and media elements we tested as sample data:

We tested all of these between both StealthGenie and FlexiSPY. You can see in the screenshot how StealthGenie captured some of them.

StealthGenie Viber Logs

After several test messages we checked our StealthGenie dashboard to see what was captured. Although the text messages themselves were captured, all multimedia and other chat data was either not indicated at all or was replaced with a mysterious blank entry as you can see from the SG screenshot. Only basic text is captured in these logs. Emoticons were replaced with their ascii text equivalent while any other media is never displayed. SG did also log the Viber call logs (not the actual recorded calls – you can’t listen to them) in a different area. This is a total score of 3 from 11 possible Viber communication types.

How Does FlexiSPY Capture Viber?

stealthgenie screenshot

Figure 3: FlexiSPY’s dashboard displaying Viber data

Although FlexiSPY does capture Viber call logs for iPhone, this wasn’t yet supported on Android. The FlexiSPY dashboard does capture all chat and media elements that were shared in our Viber conversations. This included pictures, location, voice recorded audio messages and all other Viber media, even the stickers and unique Viber doodles were captured. Although like StealthGenie, FlexiSPY captured emoticons in their text equivalents.

The FlexiSPY logs are also laid out in the familiar and readable style of separating the conversation between alternate sides of the screen. This gives FlexiSPY a total score of 9 out of 11 Viber communication types. You can see the difference in the FlexiSPY screenshot.

FlexiSPY captures more Viber IM data than any other cell phone monitoring software including StealthGenie. That means knowing more of what your target is sharing of themselves online, and what they’re truly saying with a reply like “I want that!” to a picture you can’t see when using StealthGenie.

If you don’t want to miss the differences that make the difference in IM communications, FlexiSPY is the only choice. FlexiSPY also captures other popular IM services which are summarized in the table below and in the blog article here. These are compared in other articles from this series.

stealthgenie screenshot